The future fails

Even the kid doesn’t survive the “Ring” series. No hope, no future, no burning gods’ castle, no Rhine overflowing its banks, just an empty swimming pool with a sad puddle in it. It was kind of to be expected, after it quickly became clear at the beginning of “Rheingold” that the children didn’t create anything new either, but only passed on the traumata of the adults to the next generation.

In view of her dead Siegfried, Brünnhilde briefly considers a classic “Götterdämmerung” auto-da-fé, heaves up a petrol can, but refrains from doing so. Doesn’t she get him screwed? After she had pulled the severed head of her beloved Grane – Wagner’s Valkyrie’s horse, director Valentin Schwarz’s Brünnhilde’s family friend – out of a plastic bag, she made a bed next to Siegfried on the floor of the pool. General break, love redemption motif – and that’s it.

The Grane head, a colleague speculates as they leave the Festspielhaus, could be a quote from the “Godfather”, the passage with the bloody horse’s head in a film producer’s bed, so that he obeys the mafiosi. There were enough mafia clan allusions in this “ring”.

Meanwhile, two storms are falling on the Green Hill. It’s lightning and raining heavily outside after a particularly muggy last day of the “Ring”; inside the hall the booing storm continues for the directors’ team. For almost 20 minutes, the audience raged, whistled, screamed, trampled, considering not only director Schwarz, set designer Andrea Cozzi, costume designer Andy Visit, dramaturg Konrad Kuhn and many more with (as so often in Bayreuth) frighteningly foul fury, but also booed a few singers, such as Iréne Theorin as Brünnhilde.

Conductor Cornelius Meister reaped mixed reactions, while the shouts of bravo are mainly for the supporting roles, Christa Mayer as Waltraute (she was already fabulous as Fricka), Albert Dohmen as Hagen and Elisabeth Teige as Gutrune.

The 33-year-old Valentin Schwarz may have even addressed his own lack of luck as a Bayreuth debutant on stage. The child falls dead after being handed one of the blood-red Wotans masks, the very mask of the gods with a winged helmet that adorns the cover of the program book and is said to date from the time of the premiere, as my friendly seat neighbor knows. Hands off the “Ring”? Hagen’s last call, a warning sign for black too?

Stephen Gould was canceled and Clay Hilley sang Siegfried

Speaking of unlucky: After Cornelius Meister had stepped in for the sick Pietari Inkinen two weeks before the start of the “Ring”, after several Wotan singers had canceled and Tomasz Konieczny was replaced in the last act of the “Valkyrie” by Michael Kupfer-Radecky after a chair fall had to (who gave an entertaining Gunther on coke on Friday), Stephen Gould, who was celebrated as a miracle of fitness, also dropped out this year as the “Götterdämmerung” Siegfried. due to illness. Just over a week ago he sang “Tristan”, appeared on the hill in the open air on Wednesday and is on the Bayreuth schedule for Monday as “Tannhäuser”.

The American tenor Clay Hilley, who was last heard in Stephan Herheim’s “Ring” version at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, took over for Gould. Press spokesman Hubertus Herrmann announced before the performance that they had reached him the day before while on vacation in Bari, and that intensive rehearsals were still being carried out with him. The result, the balance sheet of this “ring”? More on that on Saturday afternoon.